Anyone who thinks that being a giant, THE giant, in your market makes you safe needs to be looking at RIM this morning. The fabled Blackberry vendor has sunk to a loss, replaced its CEO, and is clearly in a world of hurt, and the reason is that it forgot the simplest rule; which is…
This week’s activity seems to me to be pointing to the future course of network equipment. On the one hand, we have Huawei reporting $32 billion in sales, good growth year over year, and demonstrating that networking from their perspective is a value market. On the other hand, we have Cisco making moves (including its…
Comcast is joining with the telcos in offering a hosted PBX and UC product, and the move is significant both for the overall competition in the UC space and for the evolution of voice and UC overall. Cisco is expanding its Jabber UC, and also linking it better with telepresence. Sprint is partnering with Cisco…
If demand-side issues are driving changes in the industry, then it’s fair to ask where the industry is going. We talked yesterday about the major drivers, and today I want to talk about the major technology shifts a bit more. In particular, I want to make the connection between the changes in opportunity and the…
We’re hearing a lot about the changes in networking, in IT, in pretty much everything technological. Likely there ARE going to be tumultuous changes, but if we want to understand them, to get the planning-for-the-future process right, then we need to understand what’s driving them. We tend, in the IT and networking world, to focus…
Friday’s usually a bit of a slow news day, and so it’s often a good day to recap some things that were pushed to the rear of the interest queue by other events. There are a couple that fit this category that I’d like to explore a bit today, and the first two come from…
HP has been having its problems, obviously, and they’re interesting from a whole-industry perspective because HP is both a broad-based player and a potential major contender for leadership in the future network/IT fusion. The problem right now is that they’re locked up in a restructuring mess and there’s a real risk they’re not going to…
Oracle is one of the more interesting tech companies, if you’re looking for an indicator of where markets might be heading overall. They have a broad exposure across hardware and software and also a nice combination of “offensive” and “defensive” products, meaning those that do well when confidence is high and those that are more…
The media is having a bit of a problem coming to terms with the NetZero proposal for “free” wireless broadband, and what’s sad is that their writers’ block is for the wrong reason. They want to say “everything is free” because that will get a lot of reader attention, but they’re skeptical that NetZero is…
I mentioned in a blog last week that there was some important progress being made in the fusion of cloud development and deployment—what the industry calls “DevOps”. There are also important developments in the area of cloud networking, another topic I’ve blogged about recently. One indication of a unified approach to these critical problems was…